Monthly Archive

The London Times is reporting “Internet shopping could account for half of Britain’s £300 billion-a-year retail market by as early as 2018 after coming of age this Christmas, it was predicted yesterday” [Christmas Day E-Sales were up 269%]

“James Roper, the chief executive of Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), the internet retail monitor, said that the pace of change would be unprecedented over the next decade, as stores have been left with little choice but to improve significantly their online offering to protect sales.

The Queen’s Christmas Day speech will be posted on YouTube for the first time as the 81-year-old Sovereign keeps up with modern technology. The Royal Channel has been created on youtube.com featuring clips of The Queen and other Royals from both archive and recent footage.

Microsoft has agreed to buy Multimap, the privately-owned British company that is second place in the UK Online mapping services market with around 4.000,000 unique visitors last month compared with Google Maps 11,000,000.

Multimap is different from many other mapping solutions because at 3 scales (resolutions) it uses the Ordinance Survey mapping data the use of which is Crown Copyright and as such restricted by the OS.

Multimap is expected to post revenues of around $24,000,00 this year, and made a profit of just under $1,800,000 in 2006.

Set to be 50% higher than last year Deloitte’s report expects the increased online spending to continue into 2008.

“The Internet is now a genuine shopping destination, sixty one percent of households in Great Britain have access to the internet from home in 2007, over half the UK population have shopped online in the last year and the number of consumers doing most of their Christmas gift shopping is set to double this year.”

“The internet is this year’s rising star, doubling its share of consumers to 14% from 2006. Verdict research (2007) reports that 31 million people in the UK now shop on the internet and our research indicates that 7 million of them will be doing most of their shopping online.”